“Fine. Fine,” I say because I just want to get out of here. I push my seat away from the table.
“Okay,” Ros says, “now, finally, we need to take a list of the clothes he’ll be wearing when buried and anything you’d like to put in the casket.”
In an alternate universe, I flip the table and Ros’s coffee goes everywhere. But in this reality I sit back down and watch her pull out a rectangular notebook; she stops to blink slowly and stare at Mum and me in turn.
She eventually asks, “Is that okay?”
A monster begins tapping on my chest, and my jaw is clenched so tight, I worry about cracking a tooth. Mum and Ros go through the things Mum’s brought. It turns out she’s brought too many clothes because she wasn’t sure of what’s needed.
“I’ll have to call a friend of mine later and come back to you,” Mum says. “I want to do this right. If you do things wrong for the dead, they can come back and haunt you.”
There’s a brief moment of respite where the monster and I roll our eyes.
“So, let me just check I’m doing everything right and I’ll return tomorrow…” Mum looks at me “… alone.”
* * *
On the train home I can finally breathe. I look around and there’s a man digging for gold in his left nostril, a woman with two lines of black thread for eyebrows, and another woman reading a prayer booklet. At the sight of it, I want to shout DON’T BELIEVE ANYTHING IT TELLS YOU, but I don’t know why. I don’t even know exactly what it is that I no longer believe.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I can’t sleep the night before I’m due to see Dad.
When Mum asked if I wanted to see Dad one last time, it took me two tries to answer her. “How can we see him—oh, you mean his body before he’s buried? I can choose? Yes, I should. I mean, I will, yes. When?”
I meet Mum at the bus stop, my body aching and my throat sore from continuously having to swallow my nausea. We get the 450 bus, just the two of us. James will be going to see Dad with Auntie Mabel.
I can’t stop tapping my feet and when Mum takes my hand and squeezes tight, I think that someday, I’ll have to do all of this again for her. When the time comes, I might be on the bus by myself.
* * *
At the funeral home, Ros is dressed in black.
She takes Mum and me into a small room with dimmed lights and candles in the corner.
My hands start to shake, and I don’t know where to look. Then I see him and a helpless cry escapes before Ros even manages to close the door behind her.
No. “Oh, Dad.”
The coffin lid is propped up, resting against the wall.
Waiting.
That’s it. He really is gone.
“No.” I shake my head. “No.”
Mum rubs my back. “It’s okay, Maame.”
“No! It’s not okay!”
Mum pulls me to her, and I cry into her jumper until my throat is tight. I step away and roughly dry my eyes because I need to see him. This will be my last chance to see him.
I turn my head and notice he looks … the same, except maybe his lips have thinned a little. He could be sleeping. I stare until I realize I’m waiting for his eyes to open.
There’s no look of frustration or uncertainty on his face, the expressions I’d grown used to seeing. His forehead is smooth, and his hands, placed on his stomach, are still. He’s not in pain anymore.
He has on his gray wedding suit, a white shirt underneath, and I press a hand to my mouth when I see he also wears his chunky silver bracelet, the bracelet he has on in the photograph I have of him, the bracelet that has been on his wrist through sickness and in health.
Mum speaks to him in Twi. “May God bless you, Fiifi. Go with Him, okay? Go with God; see your parents again; they’re calling you and waiting for you. Have peace and have rest.” She’s crying harder than I’ve ever seen before. Tears are streaming from her eyes and she punctuates her sentences with hiccups. “You have suffered so much,” she says to him, “trapped, but now you are finally free. See? Look at you already? Your swollen foot is no more. You’re already free. Go with God and be free.”
It’s comforting to hear, not so much the words, but my mother tongue. The language of my parents—they rarely spoke to each other in English.
You really should learn to speak Twi.
Before we leave, I look at his face one last time and say, “I love you, Dad. Very much, okay?”
* * *
An intense peace settles on me when I board the train, almost like I’ll never cry again. I know that isn’t true, but I’m happy to believe it for now.
It was Nia’s idea to do something after so that I didn’t have to go straight home. She knew that before seeing Dad, I wouldn’t be able to stomach breakfast, so she suggested lunch. I said, sure, but so long as it was somewhere I haven’t tried before. Somewhere new.
Nia picked a spot in London Bridge called Casa de Maria. A Portuguese restaurant she went to years ago with an old boyfriend. It’s lowly lit and the tables and chairs are wooden. There are plants in the corners and posters on the wall. Each table has a glass bottle of water and an unlit candle.
We order mushroom and caramelized onion empanadas, green rice, batatas fritas, and half a chicken to share. Nia chooses a beetroot smoothie to drink.
“What? Sounds interesting,” she says. “So does the spinach and orange. Want to get one each and then we can share?”
I order a Diet Coke.
“So, how was it?” Nia asks.
“It was good,” I answer. “Considering the circumstances, and what I mean by that is, no one else died. He looked the same, kind of like he was sleeping. I wanted to reach out and shake his arm, like a kind of ‘Wake up, Dad’ thing.”
“Ah, Maddie.” She rests her hand on top of mine.
“No, it really was good to see him.”
The waitress drops off my Coke. There’s ice in my glass and I swirl the cubes around with my straw.
“I’m glad he looked the same.”
“Didn’t they put makeup on him?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“They did with my dad.”
I leave my straw alone and watch Nia stretch her arms behind her back.
“His lips were blue,” she says, “so they put makeup on him, and to try to hide that his eyes had sunken a bit.” She rests her elbows on the table. “My uncle made me touch him and I was resisting and he was pulling my hand, saying, ‘Go on, you have to touch him! It’s your last chance!’ until I did and my dad was block-hard and cold. After, I was like, yeah, thanks for that, Uncle.”
“This is the first time you’ve really spoken to me about your dad dying.”
“Like I said before,” and she shrugs, “I didn’t want to talk about it.”
I remember when Nia came into school to tell us that her dad had suffered a heart attack in his sleep. She was wearing one of his jumpers—it swamped her, and I just stood there, silent. I almost didn’t believe her. Dying in your sleep sounded too fantastical, something that happens only on TV to sweet old grandmas. I didn’t know what to say or what Nia might need, so I hoped, if anything, she’d just tell me—she was that kind of person. Open. Honest.